I’m not sure how anyone could dramatize Augusten Burroughs’ experience – his memoir tells how he was abandoned by his unstable mother in the barely functional home of her shrink – and manage to keep the farcical from outweighing the tragic (after all, his new family thought God spoke to them through bowel movements). As such, this is a fascinating movie, just one that never quite taps into the sadness and terror that lurked behind Burroughs’ witty prose. The picture doesn’t exactly sanitize Burroughs, yet it still only gives us a part of him. With Annette Bening hitting notes of inspired mania as the mother.
